


Cutting Strings

by ihopeimbeingcrystalqueer



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A shitload of pairings, Aura Reader, Drug Use, F/F, F/M, Femslash, Red String of Fate, Soul Auras, Unrequited Love, pan!luna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:42:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopeimbeingcrystalqueer/pseuds/ihopeimbeingcrystalqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luna has always been able to see them.<br/>And Luna has always loved far too easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cutting Strings

**Author's Note:**

> First fic, you know the drill.  
> Femslash, unrequited love, just warning.  
> (the pairings are because there are so many strings of fate, and therefore many possible soulmates.)

Luna has always been able to see the strings, red silken things that she cannot touch, tied from pinkie to pinkie. They are a maze in the halls, a tangled mess of red strings, and Luna has always seen them.

No. That is a lie. 

When Luna was seven years old, her mother died in an explosion in her art studio. October Lovegood poured two spoonfuls of a blue liquid into her morning coffee instead of sugar as she sat down to finish up her latest masterpiece. 

It was never finished. 

(The autopsy report revealed the truth. The blue liquid was paint, yes, a special paint that when coupled with a certain stomach fluid, doubled as an explosive. And Luna could have taken that coffee away from her mother as she watched her in those precious few moments before death.)

October put brush to canvas. She sipped her coffee and then she screamed. 

Her torso- from a little under her collarbone to her stomach- exploded. 

The blood covered Luna's face and her mother's masterpiece, and the red strings appeared. Except for the blues and greens and white of the canvas, it was all reds. 

Luna never wears that color again.

(When Luna tried to repaint her mother's final masterpiece, she always spilled red all over it, streaking red and orange and maroon and black across the blues and greens and whites. She told the truth. Death was truth.) _  
_

Luna screamed, long and high, and no one came. The door was locked, and the key had been somewhere in her mother's apron that was torn apart along with her stomach. Her father was out on an errand. The Wizarding radio played the sounds of an orchestra over and over and over again. 

Luna sat like that, her mother dead and bloody on the floor, for hours before her father came home. 

Alone with a body. Alone with death. Alone with the desperate, bleeding truth that stole her innocence. Alone for hours as she screamed, her mother's blood splattered all over her dress. 

That can do something to a child. 

_(The doctors call it Monophobia and Autophobia and Isolaphobia)_

Luna never wants to be alone again.

~*~

Luna sees the strings immediately after. They're everywhere. The doctor has one, the mourners have theirs. Only one, for each of them. The strings lead to another wrist, another finger. Only one for each of them, and they are all so red, red, red in the sea of black, black, black. 

Exceptions. There are always exceptions.

A tall, leggy brunette in a dark dress has none, only a blue ribbon tied to her ankle. An old woman has only a few snipped-off gray cords, like Luna's father. A boy with a smooth face and a paintbrush tucked between his fingers has two, arcing out in different directions, opposites, as if asking him to choose between them. 

They are the only children there, Luna and the boy and the brunette. And Luna knows that children's strings are different, because they are the only ones she has met. 

Luna has four strings, tied to her fingers. 

~*~

When she arrives on the train for the first time, her breath catches in her throat. 

So many colors. So many red strings. 

It makes her cry in the train bathroom as she changes, and when Cho Chang finds her, tears drying on wet cheeks and black robes on, she only snickers and walks off with her nose in the air. 

(a few years later, Cho cries in the Owlery next to her, and Luna stares at the gray cord next to the red, snipped)

And so instead Luna sits with Astoria Greengrass in silence as the train marches on.

Astoria has one string. 

Only one.

Luna has come to realize that the average is three for children. 

~*~

_The **red string of fate** , also referred to as the  **red string of marriage** , and other variants, is an East Asian belief originating from Chinese legend and is also used in Japanese legend. According to this myth, the gods tie an invisible red cord around the ankles of those that are destined to meet and fall in love. Often, in Japanese culture, it is thought to be tied around the little finger._

~*~

 Luna writes in the margins. 

_it's not just a belief, or a legend_

~*~

Luna finds her first cord at thirteen. 

A slip of a girl with bright brown eyes and flaming red hair smiles at her in the compartment of the train. 

"Hello," she says, and plunks down next to her. "I'm Ginny, Ginny Weasley."

Ginny's red cords- three, like normal- are straightened and lead to somewhere. All of them. 

She's found her three soulmates. All three of them, at age thirteen, found. She's so lucky. Luna hasn't even found one, and she glances down at hers in sadness and notices something.

One of Luna's strings has straightened out as well, the others still limp. 

_Oh._

Luna smiles and talks, but the feeling- light and buoyant in her chest- doesn't go away. 

This girl is her first soulmate, hers. 

She falls hard and fast and easy. It is so easy to love when you have been told that you should love someone, when you think you're supposed to. Luna doesn't see that Ginny is too fast, too quick, too flighty, and she cannot keep her. Luna does not see that Ginny is selfish and untrusting. 

She only sees that Ginny is brave and beautiful.

She writes  _Ginevra Lovegood_ and  _Luna Weasley_ in her notebooks, and later, Pansy Parkinson calls her a dyke. Luna laughs at her, because one of Pansy's strings lead to a girl too. 

Luna knows who she'll love. She will love Ginevra Weasley with her heart and soul, give them to a girl who lost hers. Ginny has lost her heart somewhere in a traitorous diary, and Luna has lost her innocence somewhere in a closed black coffin. Ginny can give her a childhood and Luna can give Ginny love. It is all that they will need. 

Ginny and Luna- lost and found. 

~*~

She meets Hermione Granger that year as well. Her cord is thinner, not quite as thick, but still there. Hermione has four cords.

They bump into each other in the walls. Hermione gives her a strained smile, and Luna smiles back. The cord straightens out. 

They meet in the library, and Luna speaks of Nargles and Wrackspurts and home. Hermione's skeptical eyes soften a little at the mention of home, and Luna smiles brightly at her, inviting her to speak. Hermione talks of magic and fresh parchment and newly-mowed lawns, and Luna laughs in delight. 

Hermione later calls her Loony, but Luna doesn't hear it. 

She adds  _Hermione Lovegood_ and  _Luna Granger_ to her books, and she thinks that Hermione might be intelligence to Ginny's bravery. Hermione is the Quibbler to Ginny's brooms. 

Hermione could tell her of so many things, teach her of things she does not know. And they are so alone here- Hermione, who has parents that do not know of the wars she fights, and Luna, who has no friends, no one who knows, really, of being alone in a room of blood and death and being unable to escape. 

She would not let Hermione be alone, and Hermione will not let Luna be alone. They will simply be together. And that is enough, perhaps. 

~*~

Harry is next. The third. 

In the carriage, the string straightens, and Luna notices the maze of lines in the carriage. 

Ginny has three. One tied to Harry, one tied to her, and one that goes to the boy with dark hair and a sweet smile named Neville. 

Hermione has four. One to Luna, one out the window, one tied to Harry, and one tied to the redheaded boy with a fondness of saying 'Bloody hell!' His name is Ronald, apparently. 

Harry- her third soulmate- has a cord tied to Hermione, a cord tied to Ronald, a string that goes to Ginny, and one that goes out the window to someone. Luna feels, for the first time, a little scared. 

It's possible to be alone, like the tall leggy girl with no strings. Hermione choosing Ronald. Harry choosing Ginny. And her final soulmate finding another.

Luna almost screams with the fear of it. Luna doesn't want to be alone. She doesn't. 

She wants to be loved, and so she frantically writes  _Luna Potter Harry Lovegood Luna Potter_ over and over in her notebook. 

Harry could be the savior. He could save her from being alone. They are both so terribly marked by death, and maybe they can bond over thestrals and scars. 

They will save each other, and wouldn't that be a perfect love story? 

~*~

Her final string. A boy named Draco Malfoy who cries in the boy's bathroom, who can also see the strings, who is connected to Hermione Granger and Harry Potter and Astoria Greengrass and her. Luna perches on the sinks and tells him not to let the Nargles get to him. 

He calls her crazy and a lunatic and a liar. She simply tells him to look at himself. 

They are both so  _evil,_ them that have let others die, them that have killed. Draco Malfoy has a shaking wand pointed at Albus Dumbledore and Luna has thoughts of a coffee cup in her head. Draco will kill, but Luna will let them all die, and what is worse? 

Knowing that you could've saved someone and didn't, or that you've pushed them off the edge? 

Luna isn't sure, but they are both such terrible things, and Luna dangles her feet from the sink and tells Draco about dying mothers and blood. He tells her of corruption and hypocrisy and cheating. 

They are killers. Draco is a murderer with a twirling wand. Luna is a heartless little girl who sat alone in a room with a dead body for hours. Draco and Luna are distorted reflections of each other in mirrors. They are only children, but they are killers. 

Glued-together mirrors of each other, that is what they are. 

_Luna Malfoy. Draco Lovegood._ Does it matter? Luna and Draco are the same. 

She kisses him in the bathroom, and he kisses her back, but they aren't in love. Luna is just as alone with Draco as she is in her bed at night, drinking coffee to stave off the nightmares. 

Why does she have strings, if she will forever be alone? 

~*~

Ginny kisses Harry in the common room, beaming and alive in victory. Two of Luna's cords go black and die. 

Ron and Hermione hold each other as the Battle rages on, perfectly contented with themselves, perfectly contented with life, despite those who suffer around them. Luna watches as Hermione's cord crumbles around her. 

Draco and Astoria marry on an early March morning, and Luna cries in her bedroom. She is alone. She is alone, and her strings are gone. 

Luna will always be alone because of the red strings. The red strings appeared when she started to be alone, and they will be there until... until nothing. Until she dies. 

~*~

But there is hope. 

When Luna turns twenty-one, she sees Neville- the dark-haired boy with a sweet smile in the carriage from her fourth year- again, again. His strings are gone, as well- he only had Ginny, and Ginny chose Harry. 

Luna invites him out to watch the stars with her, and he tells her about his life after the war. Luna speaks of job applications and how the moon might have influenced her success. He laughs. 

Then it's a morning bike ride and his new job as the Herbology professor and how Head of Hufflepuff House has gone to Professor Trelawney's niece, the new Divination teacher, a true Seer. And how Luna has spent her last year in the jungles of South America finding plants to cure poisons, create antidotes to diseases, to reverse effects. 

She doesn't want anything like what happened to her to happen to others. 

So many days pass, and one day it changes- it changes on one of those calm, summer days where they walk to the little coffee shop and drink the coffees that are on sale (that day the apple-cinnamon is ten percent off) and eat pastries. That is the day that it all changes.

Neville kisses her. 

He tastes like crisp apples and cinammon and mouthwash- and Luna realizes with a jolt that there is hope in this kiss. Hope for a loveless pair, for two war heroes- an underestimated little boy and a strange, dreamy girl. An overwhelmed Herbology professor and a hardened explorer who broke herself with hope. 

Maybe that is enough. There are no strings, but Luna believes in Nargles and Wrackspurts. She can believe in love without those cursed strings that have brought her nothing but pain as well. 

She can believe in Neville and her. 

~*~

They get married on the first of June after two breakups and one nerve-wracking trip to a country in war. Neville proposes the very day when Luna comes home, on his knees in the home they share 

On their wedding day Luna wears silver, like the moon. Neville is in a black tuxedo and his eyes sparkle with tears, and he is half-sobbing loudly, half-speaking through his entire speech, but when he slides the ring onto Luna's finger, his fingers are steady. 

Luna cries as well, but quieter, and her fingers shake. She nearly drops the ring, but Neville catches it. 

When they kiss, a crying Pomona Sprout behind them, it tastes like salt and snot. It's wet and disgusting and their lips separate with a sucking sound that makes Luna laugh through her tears.  

Later, both of them say that it is the best kiss that they have ever had, except for maybe that apple-cinammon day in the coffee shop. And it is better than that day, because on that day Luna is free at last. 

On that day the red strings disappear. Luna never sees them again. 

**Author's Note:**

> I literally just vomited this onto a page, and after a little cleaning-up, I posted it. It is probably terrible by most of your standards (and by mine as well), but hey, I figured I might as well.


End file.
